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The Captains of Nautilus
GonzoJohn writes "The official GNOME filemanager Nautilus was originally developed by Eazel as part of their plan to bring usability and beauty to the Unix desktop. Today Nautilus is maintained by veteran GNOME hackers Alexander Larsson and Dave Camp. Being such a core application in the GNOME desktop it is the topic of many discussions in and around GNOME. In a recent survey on gnomedesktop.org an interview about Nautilus was at the top of the wishlist. So to let everyone get the inside scope on what is happening with Nautilus currently I got hold of Alexander and Dave for a small interview.""
I understand this is an early post, but I've seen that concept elsewhere before. When do you start to care as much about your explorer application as, say, your window manager ? Isn't this whole explorer metaphor quite new to *NIX, and borrowed from win/mac OSes ?
I don't think the gnome community should become as depend on nautilus as windows users are on explorer. It's a nice shell, granted, but it's an app like many others, and many users don't... use it.
My point is, that kind of integration is just not the way to go for desktop on linx. If you want to be recognized, don't follow the (questinable) ideas of others.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Someday programmers will succeed in finding the pot of gold and create a solidly stable yet totally flexible OS and apps that don't contain the bloat long associated with software like Star Office and windows. In the meantime, we "enthusiasts" need to admit that if we really do want to see linux in any of its many versions win the desktop wars, it's going to be because we've won the hearts and minds of the regular "user".
Not everyone wants to do real "admin" type work and many "users" just aren't capable of full fledged "admin" jobs. But the fact that not everyone will ever be an "admin" shouldn't mean those of us who are (or like to think we are) should give up freedom of manipulating the OS/file system/apps to our pleasure. One of the advantages in early linux was that if you survived the challenges of install you had a nice, stable OS that would behave as you wanted - if we could manage to match that flexibility with ease of install and a full compliment of standard apps we'd be well on our way.
Yes, but there is nothing wrong in borrowing an idea as long as it is a good idea
Yes, but I can bet that an application like Nautilus is necessary if you ever want to have a decent market share on the desktop . By decent I mean 10% or more.
I would love to hear from you or someone else what kind of a replacement you can offer for a user-friendly file manager.
I am a KDE user, and I love Konqueror. The little bit I tried Nautilus it looked very good to me too. Being an experienced UNIX user, I do most things from the console, but many times I find myself using konqueror just because it is more efficient for the specific task. For example, a recursive copy of a local directory tree to an ftp server where I also want to rename stuff on the fly.
I guess my point is very simple: regular users (and this means 99% of the potential users) need a powerfull yet user-friendly file manager, or something else that let's them access all kinds of files, open them, copy remove them, manage removable devices and so forth. If you come up with a better metaphore it is more than welcome. Otherwise, GNOME needs to keep going with Nautilus.